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MONDAY DEVELOPMENTS: January 22, 2007
A New Weave of Power, People & Politics: The Action Guide for Advocacy and Citizen Participation, by Lisa VeneKlasen with Valerie MillerReviewed by John Ruthrauff, InterAction

The challenge to platforms for gender equality comes not just from actors with fundamentalist agendas, but from a conjuncture where women’s rights have been opportunistically instrumentalized to serve geopolitical goals, and neo-liberal policies have severed social justice from gender equality concerns

This article uses Hilkka Pietilä’s reconceptualization of the economy as three spheres of production (free, protected and fettered) to illuminate the new ways in which neo-liberal globalization is intensifying exploitative capitalist processes. The study focuses on the particular vulnerabilities of women, the value of their unpaid work, and the transformative significance of their resistance.

Neoliberalism has spawned a swath of oppositional movements.The more clearly oppositional movements recognize that their central objective must be to confront the class power that has been so effectively restored under neoliberalization, the more they will likely themselves cohere.

Self-care and wellbeing have made a welcome comeback in feminist politics. They have been around for decades, but drifted out of focus and out of favor around the early 1990s as the dominant trends in women’s rights work took other turns. In some respects, the focus on policy and legal rights advocacy, important as that has been and continues to be for fighting inequality and advancing women’s rights, also came along with an unhelpful disconnect and hierarchy between needs and rights.

The JASS Cross Regional Dialogue (CRD) opened its doors to three days of critical thinking and mobilizing on charting a collective roadmap for attaining women’s rights and justice. Drawing 48 feminist activists from Southern Africa, Southeast Asia and Mesoamerica together for a rich and radical exchange of ideas and feminist strategies—all of this set against the backdrop of a world held firmly in the grip of patriarchy, increasing human rights violations, political crises and serious economic meltdowns.

In the beginning of the so called 21st Century, of one of the least civilized planets of the universe, the economic, political, symbolic, social and military power was in the hands of a few sick men who suffered from such a severe misogyny that they had come to despise life itself. The illness had appeared some five or six thousand years earlier, when the male humans discovered that they had something to do with the reproduction of their species.

Alquimia, JASS Mesoamerica’s learning and education initiative, integrates leadership training and knowledge generation to create a dynamic fusion of key program elements designed to strengthen feminist movement building in the region.